2013-05-25T13:05:35-04:00 Martin Lukacs http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/author/index.php?author=martin-lukacs Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Martin Lukacs Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1215693 2012-01-19T08:40:15-05:00 2012-03-20T05:12:01-04:00

Martin Lukacs http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martin-lukacs/
Chiefs and leaders from 60 First Nations gathered there to sign a declaration banning the transport of Alberta tar sands oil across their lands to the Pacific coast -- an export route to Asia and California championed by the Canadian Prime Minister ever since U.S. activists delayed construction of the Keystone XL, and now an even greater priority since Obama's full denial of that pipeline.

By last month, the number of First Nations in B.C. and Alberta opposed to Enbridge's Northern Gateway had risen to 130, an unprecedented show of unity and power.

"We are an unbroken wall of opposition," says Chief Jackie Thomas of the Saik'uz First Nation.

So when Canadian Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver ignited controversy last week by accusing environmental "radicals," "jet-setting celebrities," and U.S. "foreign interests" of hijacking public hearings for the pipeline's approval, he was avoiding the issue: The decisive threat to this latest corporate oil scheme are Canada's Indigenous nations.

There's no doubt environmentalists, municipalities, and citizens oppose Enbridge's $5.5 billion plan for many of the same reasons as First Nations: The 730-mile pipeline would carry 500,000 barrels a day of dirty oil across hundreds of fish-bearing rivers and lakes, cut through tracts of pristine wilderness, then launch supertankers through treacherous waters. Oil spills and other disasters -- think Exxon Valdez, which happened not far from the B.C. coastline -- are a certainty.

But it is First Nations who are the loudest and strongest in protest, and who most deserve backing. They are the ones most affected by the industrial operations dotting and criss-crossing their traditional territories. Enbridge's pipeline would pose a permanent danger to B.C.'s Fraser River watershed -- and so the many First Nations who rely on it for their food, livelihoods, and cultural sustenance see the project as a threat to their very survival. Living and depending on these lands, they are their first and fiercest defenders.

First Nations should be at the forefront of this fight for another very good reason: Their legal position is uniquely strong. As they have struggled to halt, delay, or minimize the effects of polluting and carbon-spewing projects in B.C. and elsewhere, First Nations have won a set of tools -- Supreme Court precedents, constitutional protection, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples -- that increase their chances of winning back control over their lands. Better than anyone else, they can stop unwanted development.

In B.C., the possibilities are the greatest: The lands over which the pipeline would cross, and indeed most of the province, were never ceded by First Nations. Their claims were affirmed by the historic Supreme Court of Canada Delgamuukw decision in 1997 that recognized First Nations still held Aboriginal title -- a legal concept. The decision sent tremors through the country: If the judges were listened to, First Nations would have a say in development decisions, share sovereignty, or even be granted ownership over the land itself. In other words, the province was still up for grabs.

Government and industry have only partially succeeded in ignoring the courts and regaining the upper hand. They've spent 15 years entangling B.C. First Nations in dead-end negotiations whose goal is to ensure these rights are never given life. But the rulings have still created enormous uncertainty over land rights. "Our title underpins this fight," says Chief Thomas. If the Enbridge review hearings rubber-stamp the pipeline, or Prime Minister Stephen Harper pushes it through, expect a First Nations lawsuit to kill it. Even former federal Aboriginal Affairs Minister Jim Prentice, now a corporate pipeline backer, has conceded First Nations have a "very strong case."

Indigenous rights have thus reshaped the debate over the pipeline. But if these rights are one day implemented on the ground, they could reshape the country's very geography. An upsurge of Canadians calling for their enactment could tilt the balance of power away from corporations and back to First Nations, transforming the management of our lands and waters. This means that supporting Indigenous rights is not simply about paying off Canada's enormous debt for generations of crooked dealings: it is also our best hope of saving entire territories from endless and senseless extraction and destruction.

After all, we're not just talking about the blocking of one pipeline or some industrial projects. This is about the right to reimagine our relationship to the environment. And First Nation's are resisting precisely to protect the alternatives: like the unrivaled marine eco-management system of the Haida Nation, near whose stormy shores on the B.C. coast an oil tanker would spell catastrophe. Or, like so many First Nations along the trail of the potential pipeline and across the country, who are struggling to win recognition of conservation agreements, of sustainable forestry, of the possibility of mixed economies, and of the principle that we must respect the environment that we are a part of.

Though most of these First Nations struggles long predate the new political war over climate change, it's about time we start thinking about them as our own most important battles. As the uses to which we put our land, air, and water accelerate resource depletion, biodiversity loss, and the climate crisis, First Nations struggle to reverse the course take on heightened importance. In trying to protect their rights, they fight for us all. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1139179 2011-12-10T11:44:41-05:00 2012-02-09T05:12:02-05:00

Martin Lukacs http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martin-lukacs/
Canada's global reputation is in tatters, and the reasons why are plain to see. A country with a deep multilateral tradition has become a climate unilateralist like no other. It was the Canadian government that fired the opening salvo of the talks when news broke that they planned to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol -- the world's only legally binding climate treaty -- before Christmas. They promised to "play hardball" with impoverished, developing countries, and dismissed the demand for industrialized nations to take responsibility for two centuries of emissions as a "historical guilty card."

"It poisoned the negotiations," says prominent Nigerian environmental activist Nnemmo Bassey. In a setting in which decisions are made by consensus of all countries, such moves were decisively damaging.

Canada dug the grave for the Kyoto Protocol so the United States could put a bullet in its body. There was speculation that U.S. negotiators came to Durban with the sole aim of preventing any new binding commitments for carbon reductions before 2020, although the U.S. climate envoy denied it. With the crucial help of Canada -- alongside Russia, Japan and Australia -- it has succeeded. They have shredded the possibility of a viable extension of the Kyoto Protocol, leaving in its place a "Durban mandate" -- finalized in secretive side meetings -- that includes only voluntary pledges for reductions. As former Bolivian ambassador to the UN Pablo Solon said in response, Kyoto has turned "into a Zombie without a global figure for reduction of emissions by industrialised countries, and will carry on walking until 2020," when it then dies. Nothing will be done to stave off climate change this decade on the international scale, while the richest nations will lead negotiations for an even weaker agreement to eventually replace the Kyoto Protocol.

The consequences in planetary suffering and dislocation are incalculable. The delays could assure temperature increases of more than four degrees Celsius, and higher on the African continent. "It is a death sentence for Africa," says Bassey. Already, 350,000 people die each year due to natural disasters caused by climate change; this will increase. By the end of the century, our world will be unrecognizable to many -- conflict-ridden, starved of food and deprived of water, and bursting with millions of climate refugees with no place of their own to call habitable.

If the negotiations spell disaster for the global south, they have been a boon to the richest corporations of the north, whose polluting ways are protected. In a calculated affront to those nations scrambling to create a fair, binding climate agreement, the Canadian government announced the approval of a gigantic, multi-billion dollar tar sands mine. It is the perfect symbol of the dirty industry's absolute capture of a willing government -- the root cause of Canada's obstructionist and subversive negotiating tactics. So long as the world's richest government gave short shrift to their historical responsibility for climate change, but full license to the wishes of wealthy business elites, little can be achieved at international climate talks.

But there are reasons to hope we can still confront climate change and drastically reduce emissions -- on the homefront. Because of the escalating pressure on the Alberta tar sands -- Canada's largest growing source of carbon emissions -- the Conservative government shielded themselves from scrutiny here in Durban. Unlike every other country, which hosted booths and appeared for public media scrums, Canadian negotiators holed away in their hotel a kilometre from the convention centre, where they held exclusive, tightly managed press conferences. By mid-week, they simply stopped holding them altogether.

The Canadian government knows that manifestations of people power are growing across the world and in the country, and it gravely worries them. The power of a burgeoning climate justice movement in the United States forced Obama to delay the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have carried half a million barrels of tar sands oil to Texas per day. The tar sand's industry is now anxiously eying the TransMountain and Enbridge Gateway pipelines to carry oil to the Pacific. But united Indigenous nations, promising a human "wall" of protest, have forced the government regulating body to delay any decision on the Gateway till the end of 2013, in an attempt to wait out growing resistance. Even the Conservative party's most faithful supporters of the tar sands are balking. A former energy minister has conceded that the power of organized opposition is tremendous: "You can't just bulldoze your way from the oilsands to the coast."

In other words, mass civic resistance works. It is in fact the only thing that ever has. The South Africans who overthrew the apartheid regime know it as well as anyone, and so did a young Indian man who settled here in Durban more than a hundred years ago. Mahatma Gandhi honed his theories of non-violent struggle in campaigns against racism and inequality in this town. Then he returned to India, took leadership of a national liberation movement, and changed the world. Those departing South Africa as the UN climate change conference reaches its dismal end must heed a similar challenge.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1093264 2011-11-16T09:09:23-05:00 2012-01-16T05:12:02-05:00

Martin Lukacs http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martin-lukacs/ request for another State Department review of TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline is rightly being celebrated as an enormous victory for the environmental movement. The decision could cost the Canadian company a delay of a year and half, more than a billion dollars, and likely the project itself. And it has sent a rarely heard message to the oil industry: Your interests may no longer govern the most pressing matters of our age.

The oil barons had every reason to assume the success of their usual formula: convert their bottomless pit of money into a free political ride. So confident was TransCanada that they brazenly colluded with the State Department to have one of their own consulting companies review their pipeline proposal. They sunk nearly $2 billion into the purchase of land and material, and secured agreements to sell their crude. Now their pipes will gather dust in warehouses; investors and the oil shippers may take flight.

Nothing now worries the oil industry more than the stranding of their bitumen. The potential demise of the Keystone XL has thrown into doubt the industry's plans for full-scale expansion of the notoriously dirty Albertan tar sands -- which NASA scientist James Hansen unforgettably described as "game over" for the climate. Oil companies can ship only as much as pipelines can carry: Without the Keystone XL, which industry had banked on to facilitate a huge production jump, Alberta's oil will be ever-more landlocked.

Such a fight-back against the oil barons hearkens back to American Progressive Era. More than a hundred years ago, John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil bullied and bribed any government that stood in its way. It ruthlessly destroyed its antagonists and enriched America's first billionaires. A powerful peoples' movement arose in response, composed of the same unlikely alliances of farmers, unions, senators and ordinary people that have marked the Keystone XL battle -- and led by the crusading writer-turned-activist Ida Tarbell, who seems to have been reincarnated in Bill McKibben. The popular pressure emboldened President Theodore Roosevelt to chart a course that should be the standard for Obama: he declared the company's directors "the biggest criminals in the country," and through new regulations shattered their power.

The difference now is the stakes are incalculably higher. The conservative International Energy Agency (IEA) has just issued an uncharacteristically dire warning: the frantic pace of construction of fossil fuel infrastructure could see our chance of combatting climate change "lost forever." The world's existing infrastructure is already producing close to the planetary carbon capacity, just short of triggering runaway climatic changes; new construction will "lock-in" the planet for certain disaster. This offers an ever-narrowing gap in which to transition to low-carbon economies: a window of five years, according the IEA. Which means the movement that has just defeated one pipeline must rapidly mount a challenge against the very logic of the expansionist, extractive outlook that knows no limits.

It is already avoiding the mistake the progressive movement made after they helped put Obama in the White House. They rested on their laurels. They seemed to forget that it is only ever independent social movements marshaling numbers and unceasingly making strong demands that can force fundamental change, and never a president of his own volition. The movement's organizers have already gathered thousands of signatures on a pledge of further non-violent resistance in case the Keystone XL rears its head. And they are looking to lend support to Canadian counterparts, who are obstructing two pipeline alternatives -- the Northern Gateway and TransMountain, which would carry tar sands crude to the Pacific -- that the oil barons are now eying with heightened resolve.

This victory, of course, is not just about the blockage of one pipeline project. It is about instilling in people a comprehension of the strength of their agitation and organizing. It's about lifting the cloak off the oil baron's invincibility and omnipotence. It's about giving the American public a sense that these goliath, greedy companies should -- and more importantly can -- be controlled, brought to heel, and perhaps even made to serve the interests of the citizens of their country. This renewed power will be needed not just to strangle and shutdown the tar sands industry, but every extreme energy project that imperils the planet's ability to sustain itself: mountaintop coal mining, deep-sea oil drilling, and gas and oil fracking.

It is a hopeful time in north America. The Occupy movement has fingered the vast and unaccountable power of corporations as the source of spiraling inequality and poverty. And the environmental movement against the Keystone XL has helped show that the climate crisis may in fact have the same root: that the frenzied search for every last drop of dirty oil is driven by the same impulse that drives the reckless search for every last dollar of profit. Checking corporate power may soon be understood as the only option for not merely a just, but also sustainable future. The oil barons have been put on notice.

]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.1032906 2011-10-28T17:16:41-04:00 2011-12-28T05:12:01-05:00

Martin Lukacs http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martin-lukacs/
Government officials and pundits had crowed that the Occupy movement would never spread north; now that it has, they insist it will not grow. "What are they all about?" Finance Minister Jim Flaherty disparagingly told media. Canada had not, like the United States, seen a devastating wave of foreclosures, recklessly criminal trading by investment firms, or a massive public bailout of the banks. No reason for protest in such a 'generous' country, he declared.

Flaherty's response perfectly embodies a defining feature of the age: the utter disconnect between elite charged with governing and those being governed. No reason for protest? The minister should ask the million Canadians who line up monthly for emergency supplements at under-resourced food banks; in 1980, not even a single official Food Bank operated. Or ask the growing numbers of homeless in urban centres, and the multiplying ranks of desperate poor in rural reservations and resource towns. Or middle-class families, shackled with record debts surpassing U.S. levels, working overtime at two or more jobs, simply to maintain the wages they made 30 years ago. These are among the legions that a 'generous' political and economic system has failed abysmally.

Those who believe Canada is not riven with deep inequalities should think again. While Canada doesn't share the extremes of power and privilege in the United States, income inequality in Canada is in fact rising faster. In the last decades, the richest one per cent of Canadians took home a third of all income growth, and pay lower taxation than they have in decades. The top 61 billionaires in Canada own twice as much wealth as the bottom half of the population. It is as if the elite had seceded from the country, deserting with its wealth and any shared recognition of how most live and suffer. Little wonder so many are finding meaning and purpose in the declaration of 99 per cent against the one per cent.

"It's not helpful to make this about class warfare," John Manley, head of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE), Canada's most powerful corporate lobby group, retorted in his haughtiest tones. But that is precisely what has transpired in this country and in much of the world: a three-decades long ransacking of the public wealth by the rich. Though it has scarcely merited mention in a media owned by the same self-serving class, this country has undergone a calculated redesign in the interests of big business. Since the 1980s, Conservative and Liberal governments alike have implemented a wish list of Bay Street demands -- deep cuts to social programs, tax breaks for corporations, privatization and deregulation and the attempted commercialization of everything in sight.

Those overseeing this neoliberal revolution have not just assaulted our wages and living standards. They have assaulted our values and expectations. The ideological adulation of self-interest, of the freedom to accumulate as much as possible and to profit enormously without service to the community, has penetrated our common sense and experience of daily life. It has deeply impacted expectations about how much we can allow ourselves to hope: for dignity and mutual respect, and for real democracy and economic security.

But the Occupy movement in Canada, like elsewhere, seems to have unleashed a flowering of expectation and political possibility. The encampments of public spaces, run democratically and non-hierarchically, have made tangibly visible to millions that the neoliberal mantra is bankrupt: there are indeed alternatives in how we treat one another and organize our world. No one is in charge of the occupations, except the anger and hope in every person. If such a movement can make corporate greed and our rigged liberal democracies unacceptable on a much broader scale, it will lay the groundwork to confront the powers of finance and big business and roll back the privileges of the elites. A sea change in expectations, a transformation of values, are not of course demands to be issued. But they are a force to be reckoned with.

The Occupy moment, in a simple but powerful slogan and tactic, has offered up the potential for a Canadian social movement for the 21st century -- vast, inclusive, and integrating consciousness of the inequities within the 99 per cent. It offers a chance for many longer-standing campaigns for economic and social justice -- heroic but usually small, isolated and ignored by the media -- to find a vital unifying battle as well as broader attention. And as more groups throw themselves into the Occupy movement, it will in turn develop in dynamism and diversity and numbers. The entry of more experienced organizers could prevent the fetishizing of a single tactic; already, its turn toward bank occupations is a good sign that it is starting to looking at a strategic course of tactical escalation.

Bold demands should come when the occupy movement grows into its power. This will help it force concessions from government or the financial sector, short-term victories that could feed the movement's morale as it hunkers down to face the encroaching, frigid Canadian winter.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.994185 2011-10-04T12:35:32-04:00 2011-12-04T05:12:07-05:00

Martin Lukacs http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martin-lukacs/ reported missing from British Columbia in May. Roberta Dawn McIvor, 32, found murdered near Lake Winnipeg in July. Kimberley Nolin Napess, 15, last seen in Quebec City in August. And two Friday's ago, Verna Simard, 50, dead after plunging from the sixth floor window of the Regent Hotel in Vancouver.

These are not isolated, unconnected incidents. The women are all Aboriginal, and their deaths and disappearances are the fruit of a rotten, unresolved Canadian legacy. In a country of deep pride but tolerance much shallower than acknowledged, these crimes are part of a secret shame: more than 600 Aboriginal women missing or murdered in the last 30 years.

Killed in their homes and in the streets, on and off reservations, by acquaintances and by strangers, Aboriginal women are the victims of an unmistakable epidemic of violence. They are five times more likely to die violently than their non-Aboriginal counterparts. In northern B.C., so many have disappeared on notorious highway 16 that it has been given a chilling name: the Highway of Tears. The Canadian government's expressions scarcely mask a truth written out in their policies and inaction: these women are disposable.

If 600 white middle-class women went missing it would be treated like a national crisis. A single such disappearance triggers emergency advertisements on television and radio news. An Aboriginal woman's disappearance, on the other hand, receives no comparable attention. For police forces it is a file to be quickly closed, often unsolved. For government officials, it is a statistic to be hidden from scrutiny. And for the media it is rarely a signal of systemic failure, but the result of a woman's occupation, her suggested sexual habits, or her supposedly shady background.

It is not sexism or racism alone that is to blame. It is an entire system of inhumane relations with Aboriginal peoples, upheld by a society that has swallowed the country's forests, rivers, minerals and their original owners and spit them out as strangers in their own land. Dispossessed and subjected to wrenching poverty, culturally demeaned and lacking access to services and housing, Aboriginal women are left exposed and vulnerable to all-too-ordinary predators. Predators who act assuming their victims will not be missed. Predators who believe they will escape with impunity.

Denied justice at every turn, it is little wonder these women's families and their supporters have turned to public protest. Twenty years ago, the first demonstrations in Vancouver's downtown eastside -- ground zero for stolen lives -- drew only a handful of women. Objects were thrown at them from passing cars. Now, thousands are marching in cities across the country; a movement has been born. Its demands include a federal inquiry, anti-racist education for police officers, and funding for frontline organizations that offer culturally-appropriate shelter, support and counseling. United Nation's committees have repeatedly echoed their calls in their reprimands of Canada.

But the current Conservative government's reaction has been utterly cynical. They have mouthed pieties about the plight of aboriginal women while cutting the funding of the very research program -- run by the Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC) -- that had finally begun to document the cases of deaths and disappearances and thrust the issue into the spotlight. After being widely criticized, the Conservatives made a show of announcing $10 million in new funds. There was a catch: they barred the use of government money for any advocacy or the continuation of NWAC's groundbreaking research. The bulk of it went instead to a federal missing person's police branch that has no specific Aboriginal mandate.

A provincial inquiry into missing women in British Columbia--one of the only government initiatives that showed promise--is now facing serious questions about its legitimacy. The inquiry has decided to fund legal counsel for police and three levels of government, but has refused to do so for several women's, community, and Aboriginal groups -- effectively excluding from participation those with the most direct knowledge of the lives and conditions of impacted women. Such failures, alongside regressive new legislation introduced by the federal Conservative government, will only worsen the situation for Aboriginal peoples. The toll will be counted not just in the packing of aboriginal youth into jails, in the degradation of Aboriginal schools, in the shuttering of inner city shelters. It will be counted in women's lives.

On Oct. 4, the many lost women will be remembered during rallies and vigils in scores of cities and communities across the country. Names will be whispered, crimes scorned, and demands to prevent their re-occurrence will be raised again. The movement's prospects are daunting but stirring, because they impel us to understand that justice is never served by short-term political fixes: to fully end violence against those bearing the brunt of a battalion of social ills -- the theft of Aboriginal lands, racial and sexual domination, the war on the poor, and the erosion of the welfare state -- will require nothing less than the wholesale transformation of society. The courage to imagine such change would ensure that Canadians become truly deserving of self-praise.]]>